The Spectacle at the Tower (English and German Edition)

Quite like it. Not Gert greatest, but far better than most . . and certainly one of the very few things of intellectual merit to wiggle its way out of Europe during the 20th century. An ectopic journey full of dust and sweat suggesting the better spent vacation is the one in which you've the greater chance of finding yourself in the shadow of Mickey Mouse. I give it 3 bananas out of 4.

This is my absolute favorite book ever. I have read it 5 or six times and could easily read it 5 or 6 more. Hofmann has brilliantly captured the weird psychological quirk that makes all of us want to stare at car-wrecks. The misery of a failing marriage coupled with a first-world's tourist's grim fascination with decay and desperate poverty. Beautifully written and deeply disturbing.

A divine parable. A German married couple on the verge of breaking up smell a stinking corpse on a drive through Italy. When their rental car breaks down in a seedy, decrepit Sicilian town, they are forced to participate in a banal tourist spectacle at a nearby water tower--and find themselves witnesses to an act of barbarity. Hofmann conjures a gothic atmosphere out of petty and mundane incidents. The novel works both as an all-too-believable tale of a horrid holiday, and on a deeper level, as a damning parable of third-world exploitation by slumming first-world tourists